ideas worth stealingWhy narrow-mindedness is a path to failure
Normally, I have a healthy level of respect for the cats at Adaptive Path, but AP staffer Todd Wilkens chalked up a rather misguided post today on “Why usability is a path to failure”.
To his credit, Wilkens states:
“Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure. Usability is too low level, too focused on minutia. It can’t compel people to be interested in interacting with your product or service. It can’t make you compelling or really differentiate you from other organizations. Or put another way, there’s only so far you can get by streamlining the shopping cart on your website.”
Usability alone will definitely not compel people to invest time or money into your product. I agree with that part. What I find troubling is a different statement.
“So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up ‘usability’ as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on.”
Todd, we hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.
Anyone in the interaction design or usability profession worth his salt knows that usability is a single piece of a very large “experience puzzle”. You need a strong value proposition to get users in the first place. You need a compelling product or service. You need good customer service when things go wrong. You need marketing prowess. You need something that makes you different, and better, than everyone else in your space.
For a product or service to be great, you need all these things. But you also need a usable touchpoint. A strong value proposition gets people interested in your product, but once you have their attention, a high level of usability helps motivate people to keep using it. A low level of usability deters people from using your product.
Usability helps beginning users become intermediates. Usability creates a good first impression. It helps people enjoy their experience. Usability is an investment in repeat business.
Usability is not a path to failure. Narrow-mindedness is a path to failure. Focusing all your efforts on usability means not doing all the other things that make a product great. Likewise, focusing all your efforts on the value proposition can mean putting out an unusable product.
You can’t focus on one thing. You have to focus on all of them.
Posted by Robert on July 17th, 2007
3 comments
“Usability alone will definitely not compel people to invest time or money into your product.”
iPhone anyone?
Nice answer to Todd’s controversial post !
I think you nailed the underlying problem when you said :
“Todd, we hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.”
Most companies are still in the learning phase, so let’s not rush things and take usability as granted ;)
As for the iPhone, they have usablity AND a strong product AND a good customer service AND a marketing buzz that makes you want to have it desperately even if you’re deaf or blind (or both)…
First impressions and workings of the visceral mind states that usability has little to do with first impressions, aesthetics has. (Gitte Lindgaard et al. “You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression”)
Aesthetics and the Halo effect create what she defines as “perceived usability”: A visitors subjective impression of an application which has been directly influenced by the instinctive impression (Blink!) the aesthetics of the design creates.
- This off course depends on how much time you decide a first impression is allowed to take (one second or the whole first session).